1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus having a lock setting function and a control method thereof. More specifically, the present invention concerns a video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus having a lock setting function capable of locking a video and audio file recorded on a storage device so as to prevent important files from being lost due to a lack of storage capacity while overwriting the file on a recording area, and a control method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
A video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus, which is capable of recording a broadcast signal and reproducing the recorded broadcast signal on and from a recording medium, has expanded its function with the development of digitization and compression technologies of the broadcast signal. Such a video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus is still under development so as to support various video sources such as the broadcast signal via a satellite and a cable, and network broadcasts via the Internet. To this end, the video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus employs a hard disc drive, which is a mass storage device, to record the video and audio signal carried by the various video sources.
The hard disc drive enables random access which can directly reach desired data using a data address, has a high data transfer rate, and enables writing of the largest amount of information. Thus, the hard disc drive is prevalently used as an auxiliary storage device.
The hard disc drive is configured to have a cluster structure used in a personal computer. In the personal computer storage technology, the cluster is a logical unit of file storage on the hard disc drive and is managed by an operating system (OS) of the computer. Any file stored on the hard disc drive takes up one or more clusters, and the largest file storage may take up several clusters.
When a single file is stored in several clusters, the clusters are not necessarily next to each other and may be rather widely scattered over the hard disc drive. A file allocation table (FAT) manages a location of the clusters associated with the single file, which are stored in a certain area on the hard disc drive. The FAT records the clusters storing the file on the hard disc drive, the sequential order of the clusters storing the single file, and status information on the clusters.
The video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus employing such a storage device facilitates the recording and the management of the video and audio file supported from the various video sources.
When recording a file on the hard disc drive, a conventional video and/or audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus compares capacity of the hard disc drive with that of the file and determines whether the latter exceeds the former. If so, the video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus determines whether an overwrite function, which overwrites the file on the used recording area, is set. If not, the video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus outputs an error message indicating that the file recording is impossible due to the lack of the recording area.
If the overwrite function is set, the video and audio file is overwritten on the recording area of the hard disc drive in a sequential order according to FIFO (first-in, first-out) or LIFO (last-in, first-out).
However, the conventional video and audio recording and/or reproducing apparatus may lose important files when the file is overwritten on the recording area in sequence automatically depending on the setting of the overwrite function if the entire recording area of the hard disc drive is occupied and the storage capacity is not sufficient. In other words, undesired files may be deleted due to the overwriting.